Here in Vermont they are going to start switching over to “smart” electric meters soon.
If you have one, does it really lower your electric bill magically?
Do the radio waves from them make you sick?
And how do they work on a cellular signal if my cell phone doesn’t get service at home?
Any stories about them not working with the wiring in older homes? My house is about 200 years old, the wiring was installed about when we got running water during WWI (or so it seems). I’ve seen stories about old house fires caused by the smart meters. Why aren’t they UL tested and approved?
Anyways, I am going to opt-out, even though it costs $10 a month for a human to come and read the old meter. I guess I’ll be helping the economy and job market, right?
But to get the new unit and to get it installed is free- huh? Sure the electric company got a grant from the federal government, but they are still spending 69 MILLION dollars to install them, for free. The math seems a bit off.
I doubt the meter lowers your electric bill at all. It just allows you to take advantage of better electric rates (we use time-of-day rates, and save a ton of money).
No the radio waves don’t make you sick - why would they?
Most meters use “mesh networking” where they communicate from house to house, so each meter doesn’t need a cell phone signal.
I seriously doubt that a new meter could cause a fire, and I’m sure that they are UL listed - no utility would do otherwise.
Smart meters are today mostly for the benefit of the electric company. It costs them huge amounts to send out meter readers, often multiple times per year for each house. Eliminating meter readers is a huge savings. They’ll also be able to get moment by moment readings of usage and that will allow them to plan operations and lower buying of electricity on the spot market. And they will prevent the enormous amounts of usage theft that goes on today. Pretty much everything about them is a plus. So that’s why they’re spending the money. Some states are mandating them and more of them will shortly. Everybody will have one eventually.
Will they benefit you? Eventually all utilities will go to off-peak pricing and allow you to run your house more efficiently. Whether you can do that now is a local issue. But your bills will be more accurate. And nobody will be knocking at your door. Why anybody would want a meter reader to call is beyond me.
Anything you do at every house in America (and elsewhere: that story is from Australia) will have a certain number of problems, even if it goes right 99.9999% of the time. It’s not a UN plot, though. I can guarantee that.
To expand on this the meters can talk to each other to pass the information along until they get to a piece of hardware that uses either ethernet or GPRS(cell) to get the data on the internet so the utility company can actually receive it. Also they’re probably running at 900mhz to get better range on the radios. (Oh, and there’s smart water meters as well.)
I don’t have one. From what I have seen though, the amount of savings you get varies, not only by how you use your electricity, but also by your area and how they set their rates. Originally, a lot of smart meters were installed to encourage night time use of electricity, basically because the power company was overloaded during the day but had plenty of extra capacity at night. As more people switched to doing their laundry at night and that sort of thing, the loads evened out, and in many areas the power companies stopped charging as great of a differential rate for off-peak usage.
If you still use your electricity most during peak hours you won’t save anything. If your power company doesn’t offer substantial rate incentives for off peak hours, you may not save much either way.
Our current understanding of radio waves is that they can’t make you sick. It is difficult to prove a negative, but people have been trying very hard to establish a connection between radio waves and something bad since the 1970s, and so far there has never been a single study that has held up to peer review and follow-up studies that has suggested any such link.
Once in a while, you’ll get studies that find something. Some of these studies are flawed. Some of them are done in a perfectly valid way, and just through statistical anomalies or whatever they seem to show some kind of link. But then in follow-up studies the result doesn’t hold. Unfortunately, the way these things get reported the “CELL PHONES KILL!” makes the front page headlines, while the follow-up “Nope, sorry, didn’t actually find anything after all” isn’t exactly a headline grabber, and not only won’t make the front page of the paper, it might not even make it into the paper at all. This gives folks the impression that there is a lot more support for radio waves being bad than there really is.
Not only have radio waves not been proven harmful, no plausible mechanism by which they could be harmful has even been proposed yet.
Power companies are considered to be experts in electrical safety. After all, they have the authority to decide whether or not your house is safe and can shut off power to you if they think it’s not. It would be kinda silly to require them to submit their equipment to UL for testing. Asking the power company to submit to UL testing is a lot like asking a math professor in college to have one of the teaching assistance check his math to make sure he’s doing it right.
I don’t work in the power industry these days, but I personally am not aware of any problems with smart meters causing fires. If there is a bad connection in the meter’s base it can overheat and cause a fire, but that can happen with a regular old fashioned spinny wheel type power meter as well (in fact a bad connection pretty much anywhere can cause a fire). The smart meter’s electronics operate at very low power levels and everything is encased in a very sturdy sealed enclosure. From a fire safety point of view, smart meters are designed a lot better than just about anything else in your home.
Smart meters are also nothing new. They were installing these things all over the place when I did work in the power industry a couple of decades ago. People tend to fear things that they think are new or that they don’t understand. I don’t see where there is anything to fear here.
Smart meters not only monitor your electricity usage, but they also monitor power quality and things like power factor, which affects the efficiency of power distribution throughout their system. The increased monitoring allows the utility company to be more efficient, and since less electricity is wasted through inefficiency, less pollutants are thrown up into the air from mostly coal fired power plants and less nuclear waste is generated by nuke plants, etc. It also helps to ease the load in areas like the northeast and southwest U.S. where power systems are already strained to the max during peak times (hot summer days, when everyone is running their AC). Smart meters also give the power company a better picture of what is going on throughout their system, which allows them to identify and fix problems faster.
The government may be throwing tons of your hard earned tax dollars into this, but the government does actually have a reason for it.
(btw, I am an electrical engineer, which may make you think my opinion is a bit biased in favor of the power company. I did work for Ohio Edison about 20 years ago on several projects designed to improve power plant efficiency. These days though, I design industrial control hardware and software. I do not have any current connection to the power industry)
No, it did not magically lower my utility bill. What it did was provide more accurate readings. What did magically lower my utility bill was opting into the peak-hours/off-hours plan. My rates are 4X the normal rate from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. So I only do laundry or run a major power-sucking appliance after 7 p.m., or on weekends and holidays. *That *dropped my utility bills in half.
No, the radio waves do not make me sick. Neither do the radio waves from my radio. Nor do the microwaves from my microwave make me sick. What makes me sick is pollen, dust, and dander, for which, sadly, my utility company has no solution.
How do they work on the cellular signal? I have no clue. I have a rudimentary understanding of how my car, my computer, and my cellphone work, but not really, and I still use them all every day anyway. If I was really concerned about it, though, I’d probably call the utility company and *ask *them.
Stories about smart meters not working in older homes? My house is 70 years old. However, the wiring has been updated in the last 20 years. That said, I think the smart meters in my city are solar-powered because, AFAIK, they are not hard-wired into my house. So I don’t know if they are or are not UL tested and approved. It’s not in my utility company’s best interests to install something that could short out and burn my house down. Because then there would be no utilities for me to pay for!
How much was the government grant for? Because you said the math does not add up and it doesn’t: you told us the cost will be $69 million, but you failed to tell us how much the grant was for. So there’s no math to do.
My question: why were you asking all these questions when you clearly have already made the decision to opt out?
Another advantage of the smart meters is they give the power company the ability to respond quickly to outages. When a squirrel blows up a transformer on your block, they will know immediately because a block of houses will suddenly go dark and they can send out a truck without anyone needing to make a call.
The meters themselves aren’t supposed to save you money, it’s your own usage patterns that will do that. The new digital meters have an IR LED that blinks somehow according to usage. There are monitors available that can read the IR signal and transmit the reading to a display in your house, or your computer. There are some web services that can interface with the monitors to give you historical usage graphs, tell you how much you are spending, and even detect specific appliances turning on and off to tell you how much it costs to run your fridge or air conditioning.
The meters in my city use Wifi to connect to access points scattered around on light poles, which mesh network their way to receivers that connect to the municipal fiber network. They say in a year or so they will start sending out in home monitors that the meters can transmit to. I’ve heard there are studies that found that once people gain the ability to monitor their usage in real time, they change their habits and save an average of 20% on their bill.
We have had the new meters at our house for about two years. SDGE has not made it easy to see your hour by hour usage. They have only a very clunky web interface. I was sad when google power shut down and I no longer had access to the minute by minute data. There is no difference in rates during the day. So the only gains are the ease of meter reading.
As far as radio waves go, the only plausible connection that I have seen is that having a cell phone against your head results in a slight increase in temperature (just as microwaves heat food) and that could have some adverse effects, but any increase can’t be that much given the power level; your body temperature naturally fluctuates by up to several degrees over a day.
Anyway, we don’t have smart meters here, although I have an automated meter, which is somewhat similar (the difference is that smart meters can receive data and communicate with appliances in your home, if you have any that can do so, and have some additional features). They can still save though with real-time tracking of power usage; I don’t know what difference it makes if any, since the house had it since before I moved in.
If anything, I’d expect the new meters to improve safety. A fair number of houses have dangerous wiring in them, right now (usually from incompetent DIY jobs). Some of those dangers are in the vicinity of the meter. The new meters are designed by people who know what they’re doing, and will be installed by trained professionals. When they do, they’ll replace the wiring in that immediate vicinity. If there is dangerous wiring there, it will be replaced by safe wiring there. Ergo, an increase in safety.
We’ve had one for a while, with no change to anything. In the Bay Area there was outrage about the meters in some places, and it turns out that a few were buggy and giving high bills, but not all that many.
As far as reducing power, there have been a lot of studies to see whether seeing what your neighbors are using (not exactly numbers, just more or less than what you have) will affect your power. It seems that if your neighbors use less you might cut your usage; but it turns out if they use more you increase your usage.
Our meter is outside our fence, so we never had to worry about the reader calling, but I can see the advantage if you had to be home. And of course it is a lot cheaper for the utility.
I have had one a few years. It did not change my electric bill, mostly because previously, they sent people around monthly to read it. The readings on the old meter (which was outside) were accurate, as were those on the electronic one. Of course, we don’t have off-peak pricing.
However, make sure they put it on correctly. National Grid forgot to caulk the spot where the cable from the meter went into the house and we had water flowing through our electrical box. :eek: Cost $900 to replace it.
Interesting to see this thread. We will be getting a smart meter in the next couple of years, and it will make things much easier for us and the meter reader Our current meters are inside the house so we have provided the meter reading company with a key for our back door. Easy enough, you might think but we also have two dogs. If we’re out, then it’s a good chance that the dogs will be loose in the back yard. The person doing our area for the reading company is shy of coming into the yard with the dogs loose so we haven’t been getting our meter read. Each month we get an estimated reading on our bill, instead of every second month.
I’ve only heard of one customer that had a problem with her meter after it was changed. She started getting very high bills and claimed they were much different than previously for the same time of year. When the meter was checked it was declared to be working as designed. I guess her old meter was not working too well.
I just read a pamphlet about these from PG&E which has been laying around here for several months. These meters can gather hour-by-hour statistics, and that goes into a database at the power company. Then you can go to their web site and look up your account and get charts and graphs and pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is… So this is supposed to help you to manage your power usage. You can do your laundry or run your A/C for an hour and then look up how much power that used and what it cost you.
Many people have a paranoia problem with this. Having that kind of detailed profile of your power usage seems very intrusive to some people. Who will get to see that data? Will it all be an open book to any and all law enforcement? Will fed or state or local governments fish through everybody’s data en masse looking for suspicious patterns? Will the utility companies merrily deliver whatever data they ask for, just for the asking? Will they cooperate only if there is a court order or subpoena?
Remember that the gov’t demanded call logs from telecomm companies, and AT&T rolled over and cooperated too easily. (Sorry, no city at my fingertips, but it was all in the news a few years ago.) In contrast, when they asked major web engines for search data or other personal logs, Google famously resisted. How will all this play with the power companies?
Also, there are pilot programs around where the power companies, through their smart meters, can actually manipulate your power usage for you. They can control your A/C for you. These are entirely voluntary pilot programs, but you can imagine the paranoia that these kinds of programs raise. How much longer will it be voluntary? There’s a slippery slope!
The point being, these smart meters monitor and collect extensive very detailed data about your energy usage, and a lot of people aren’t ready to trust the utilities, and the gov’t regulators and law enforcement, with that.
You clearly know nothing about them, but you suspect that they’ll make you sick and burn down your house? My mother was convinced that the new meter made this loud gringing sound and that it made her sick. She was convinced until I pointed out to her that she didn’t have the new meter yet!
If you are looking for proof that they are part of a vast conspiricy to make you sick, there are a variety of sites out there run by the tin foil crowd to help you with that.
So, the utilities trying to save their customers money is some sort of evil government plot, now? Don’t worry, I’m sure that if you really want to throw your money away, there will always be some means available to do that, no matter how helpful government gets.
Oh, us non-trusting New Englanders! It’s true. We are protective and all. Outsiders don’t understand our way of life and how we value our independence and self-reliance. The old way is the best way, of course, and change is bad. I am being serious here.
Last year, we had a contractor for the local phone company come to our house to install the new fiber optic internet line outside (while I wasn’t home, luckily). He proceeded to walk around on the porch roof (which is a death wish), make a shortcut through the ancient lilac bushes, and stomp all over our holly bushes. Yup, I tried to get him fired. And all of this to make our already fast internet faster, which we really don’t need or want.
So should I trust another contractor to come into our house to change out the electric meter? You better believe I would be there to watch his every move! Especially since the meter is inside our house, and not on an outside wall.
And yes, they are contractors, or sub-contractors. The lowest possible bidders. From out of state, GASP! Flatlanders, none the less! They are hired to get shit done, ASAP. No respect or care.
Anyways, I am not concerned about the health effects of the radio waves. And I can’t figure out how the new meters will save us money. We grill food outside all year, we don’t have a clothes dryer, we have the smallest fridge ever made, we have no AC, the heat is set at 52 degrees all winter (pellet stove), we do laundry at night in our efficient front loader, etc. How could we possibly use less electricity?
So by me using my computer, modem, and internet router to check my usage online constantly I will save money? By using electricity, I will use less electricity? And doesn’t the meter use electricity to constantly send wireless signals?
I’m not really concerned about the electric company being alerted to power outages faster- while living here for 7 years the power has gone out twice. Both times a car hit a pole, so it’s pretty obvious.
Yes, I am worried about the new meters versus our old house wiring; and the new meters being installed badly by a teenager whose uncle got the lowest bid. If ANY electrical work is done inside my house, I demand that it be done by a licensed and insured local electrician. Not by somebody who was hired by the lowest bidder from out of state, and is in a hurry to finish as many jobs a day as possible. Not to mention that the meters are also not UL tested (too lazy for a cite).
Smart meters lower costs for everyone. That makes them a public good. If you don’t contribute, you gain nothing and everybody else loses a bit. And nobody cares about you.
I should note that the Electric utility can change the meter out without asking your permission - it’s (generally) outside of your house, and is their property.